RF Generation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
RF Generation is a website that collects information related to video games. Games developed in many countries (including the USA, Europe, Japan, China, Korea, Brazil, and Australia) are featured. Consoles covered range from the Magnavox Odyssey to the Xbox 360. It is using this information to become the most comprehensive video game database and video game collection tool on the internet.
As of March 6, 2006, the site contained within its database approximately:
- 21,000 video games
- 12,500 game scans
- 12,000 screenshots
- 115 consoles and handheld gaming systems
User and staff submissions are automated.
Video game collectors may find the site useful for the free collection tracking and trading tools, including 5MB of image space for users to showcase their collection. Downloadable system checklists are also available.
[edit] History
RF Generation was founded on April 28, 2004, by Michael Collins, Mark Hartholt, Eddie Herrmann and Laurel Mateskovich - some of who were former staff members of the now-defunct Video Game Bible. A very important part of the site's founding beliefs was making sure that everyone and anyone who helped was properly thanked and credited for anything they contributed.
In the morning of June 8, 2004 the website was officially announced and became accessible to the public. Some items were still being worked on at the time, but the message boards were set up for users to access. A few hours later a temporary version of the rest of the website was uploaded. This was to fill the gap while the framework for the database was being edited.
June 9, 2004 Tyler Dorval, aka Odonadon, joined the RF Gen Staff. He left his position on the Staff at a later and currently unknown date.
June 17, 2004 Dennis Gruchala, aka Den68, joined the RF Gen Staff.
June 24, 2004 The ability to attach files to your posts was added to the message boards. The maximum allowed file size was originally 600KB. This was later dropped to 350KB.
Members who were lucky enough to be on the website at 1:45 on the morning of July 1, 2004 would have been the first to see the unveiling of the RF Gen collection tool by Eddie Herrmann. It worked in conjunction with the already existing database of 5,000+ game titles. Members were, for the first time, able to list their games online to keep track of them. Users were also given the ability to rate games on a scale of 0 to 100.
August 8, 2004 a new script allowing members of the website to submit missing information for game pages was added. This allowed non-staff members to more easily submit information about a game; such as release date, genre, publisher, and developer, as well as overviews, reviews, and game trivia. Since its inception, thousands of games have been updated thanks to the efforts of many members.
August 19, 2004 Anthony Terzi, aka Izret101, joined the RF Gen staff.
September 20, 2004 Advanced Postings Statistics where added to member profiles. Giving you the ability to see how many topics you or other members have started, total posts, and graphs of these over a period of 14 days, 14 Weeks or one year. These results could either be dynamic, showing a graph that would go up or down depending on how often you posted, or accumulative, which shows a constantly increasing graph.
September 24, 2004 Mark Hartholt, aka Arrrhalomynn, left the RF Gen staff for the first time.
September 30, 2004 was the start of the first server change for the website. The old server was experiencing too many problems and was having excessive amounts of downtime. Luckily, these service dropouts were for the most part early in the morning eastern standard time. Hence, they mostly affected European users. Six days later the website had been fully transferred to the new servers. There was a short downtime on October 5 due to the transfer, but aside from that everything else had gone smoothly.
October 11, 2004 Kyle Niday, aka freak_boy, joined the RF Gen Staff.
October 12, 2004 Mark Hartholt retuned to the RF Gen Staff.
November 28, 2004 Scott Williams, aka Tynstar, joined the RF Gen Staff.
December 2, 2004 RF Gen had its 100th registered member.
December 22, 2004 The member only known as sharp was added to the RF Gen Staff.
On January 3, 2005 there was a new addition to the collection tool, Collection Profiles. Users were given the ability to write a description about their collection as well as upload 3MB worth of pictures to showcase it. On the top of each person's profile page was their description. Below that were their stats, which was very versatile and allowed people to see percentages of games owned across consoles, regions, genres, release years, and publishers. Lastly, below the stats were any photos of that member's collection that they had uploaded.
January 31, 2005 The first System Checklists were uploaded to the website. There were 68 PDF lists available at this launch all of which were for the most complete NTSC consoles listed in the database.
February 7, 2005 The second volley of System Checklists were available on the website. These where for the Brazilian, NTSC-J, PAL regions.
February 18, 2005 Another new feature was added to the site. On the main page of the website a section for a Featured Game was added. The first game showcased was Tales of Symphonia.
Five days later on February 23 the main page received a few more new additions to make updates and changes to the website visible as they were happening. These new features were the Updated Games, Updated Collections, and New Images sections. They appeared in that order on the right side of the page below the Featured Game. Updated Games displayed the last 5 updated game pages and the games' titles were linked to their respective game pages. Updated Collections was similar, but instead it linked you to the users' respective collections. Updated Images linked to the game page just like the Updated Games would, since the game page is where one can choose to view any scans or screenshots of a particular game.
March 18, 2005 Rick Johnson, aka captain_nintendo, gained his position among the RF Gen Staff.
April Fool's Day of 2005 came as a surprise to quite a few members of the RF Generation community. Whenever anyone tried to visit the website they would be redirected to Composite Generation. There was a new set of message board rules written up, and all systems that use RF switches were excluded from the database. Only three of the site members even knew about the prank, Michael Collins (who's username at the time was Reverend Nepenthean), Eddie Herrmann (St0rmTK421) and David Murnan (TraderJake). Therefore, it was a surprise even to staff members. Some people had been truly fooled by it and did not realize it was a joke until it had been more or less pointed out by those on the new forums. Arguably one of the funniest things about the day was not known until April 6 when Michael Collins, the webmaster at the time, received an email from a website that sold various kinds of cables. The email stated that they had put a link to Composite Generation on their website under the Composite Cables section and hoped that the favor would be returned. Stating that it had "...some really good stuff related to my site's topic of cables and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great aspects of cables that I'd like to give my visitors more information about."
April 6 was also the debut of the RF Gen Top 100 games. All games in the database with 3 or more votes would be put into the running for the Top 100 list.
On April 21 due to the great volume of members posting scans on the message board or sending scans via email to staff members, a new script was added to allow normal members to submit images. These images would then be reviewed by a staff member to assure the quality of the scan and subsequently added to the database.
April 28, 2005 was the release date of two Mozilla Firefox plugins. One for searching the database for gamepages, and another for doing an image search in the database. Both of these can still be downloaded at the bottom of the RF Gen homepage, www.rfgeneration.com.
May 24, 2005 Pieter Verhallen, aka Speedy_NES, became a Staff member.
June 1, 2005 Tony Holly, aka tholly, joined the RF Gen Staff.
On June 8, 2005 RF Generation celebrated its one year anniversary. In one year's time, the database had grown to include over 18,000 games and over 17,000 images. To celebrate the one year anniversary, RF Gen held a "Birthday Blowout Contest." Mike Collins supplied a photo of himself wearing a Tiger R-Zone and in order to enter yourself into the contest, you had to supply an edited version of the picture. The winner of the contest was to receive the Tiger R-Zone that was pictured, games (to be announced), an official RF Generation baseball cap, and a one-year subscription to the gaming magazine of their choice.
The ability for the addition of software variations was also added on this day. This allowed for Greatest Hits, Platinum Hits, Player's Choice and other similar titles to be added to the database.
On top of all of that, RF Gen also had its 200th member register.
July 11, 2005 TraderJake was announced the winner of the first Birthday Blowout Contest. His photoshopped work of art entitled "R-Zone's Secret" narrowly beat Danvx6's "R-ZoneThinker" by one vote and The Evil Leon's "Tian Men Mike" by two votes.
September 26, 2005 RF Gen had its 300th registered member.
September 27, 2005 RF Gen experienced its second server problem. It had 'filled' the server space, and items were being deleted from the message boards. Within a few hours, the problem had been isolated and the deleted items restored, possibly the two most important items that were restored were the accounts of Anthony Terzi (izret101) and Zac Saxton (CatchFiveBats).
December 12, 2005 Anthony Terzi set up and began work on the RF Gen MySpace.
December 18, 2005 The RF Gen MySpace was released to the public.
3 January 2006 RF Generation had to switch servers for the second time. This time it was due to the host breaking their service. Stating that YaBB.pl, the script that the message boards ran on, was not allowed to run on their servers. It had never been mentioned previous to this occasion, however, and was not stated anywhere in the contractual agreement. Unfortunately, the message boards were down while a new host was being found. The remainder of the website remained online and accessible.
January 6-7 2006 RF Generation was back online and fully functional sometime between 11:30 p.m. on the 6th and 12:30 a.m. on the 7th.
February 1, 2006 The RF Gen community experienced its first great loss when the first members learned that Michael Collins' life was tragically cut short. This left a void in many peoples' lives as his passing created the loss of a son, brother, and a friend. The RF Gen community did its best to comfort those who knew him best by sending out prayers and apologies. The relative message board thread was viewed and commented in by members of his family, members of the website, as well as members from other websites where Mike was known. In an effort to honor Mike and keep him in their memories, "R.I.P. Michael 'Nepenthean' Collins. You will not be forgotten." was added to many users' signatures. Some members later replaced it with a commmorative banner/signature created by Dennis Gruchala.
February 24, 2006 Mark Hartholt left the RF Gen Staff for the second time.
March 31, 2006 RF Gen's 500th member registered.
April 28, 2006 RF Generation celebrated its second birthday. This time on the actual day of its creation rather than the day it was made widely available to the general public. This years contest, called "The Terrible Two Contest", was for the most unlikely scene in a videogame. The example used was Mario running through Hyrule.
Also a RF Gen IE Toolbar was released to the public. The toolbar enables users to access the message boards, perform both image and data searches of the database with all the same criteria available on the search page, submit both info and images. It also allowed for direct access to all personal collection tools and all of the "features" of the site, top 100 games, bottom 25 games, etc.
May 2, 2006 A day later than planned the first official month long contest was set into action by Izret101. After an initial vote on what games to play there had to be a runoff vote due to a tie. After the second round of voting Tetris for the NES was decided. More specifically it was the licensed version of Tetris Game Type A.
[edit] Database History
June 12, 2004 Atari XEGS, Commodore 64, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Game Boy Color, Sega Game Gear, Magnavox Odyssey, IBM PC Jr., Sony PlayStation, Watara Supervision, Coleco Telstar Arcade, TI-99/4A, TRS-80, Nintendo Game & Watch consoles where all added to the RF Gen database with help from Joe Santulli who shared some of those lists from his own database.
August 26, 2004 The database surpassed the 6,000 image mark. This included scans and screenshots.
September 24, 2004 In less than one month another 1,000+ images had been added to the database. The 7,000 image mark was passed on this day.
October 3, 2004 With the addition of 37 scans for the various Game Boy systems the database had reached exactly 3000 scans. A few hours earlier the video game console XaviX was added to the database with all 3 of its released titles.
October 11, 2004 Two image milestones were passed side by side on this day, 5,000 screenshots and 8,000 total images.
October 13, 2004 The Nokia N-Gage was added to the database.
November 25, 2004 The database surpassed 14,000 titles.
November 26, 2004 The database passed the 6,000 screenshots mark.
December 4, 2004 10,000 images were reached after the addition of 300 NES screenshots.
December 6, 2004 The Nintendo DS was added to the database.
December 16, 2004 The Nintendo e-Reader and Pokémon mini was added to the database.
December 21, 2004 This day saw the break of the 15,000 total game pages.
December 22, 2004 The Tapwave Zodiac and Tiger Gizmondo were both added to the database.
December 23, 2004 The MegaDuck and Cougar Boy were both added to the database with all their releases thanks to RF Gen member renelips.
January 4, 2005 Over 7,000 total screenshots were in the database. This was the fifth month in a row that 1,000 screenshots had been added.
January 8, 2005 The 16,000 game mark was overtaken. In just three short weeks, 100 new titles had been added to the database.
February 1, 2005 The PSP was added to the database.
February 9, 2005 After nearly 4 months, another 100 scans had been added to the database. 4,000 scans had finally been acrewed.
February 11, 2005 Two more consoles where added. The only GameMaster, which was only released in Europe, and the Nintendo iQue, which was only released in China.
February 25, 2005 The website passed the 12,000 image mark and was at exactly 12,100 images.
February 26, 2005 The 17,000 game mark was passed.
February 27, 2005 The total number of screenshots in the database passed 8,000.
March 5, 2005 The Bandai SuFami Turbo and the Bandia Playdia. All 13 games released for the SuFami Turbo were also added.
March 14, 2005 The Sharp X68000, BIT Corporation Gamate and ColorVision were all added to the database. Also all of the games released for the ColorVision were added to the database.
March 30, 2005 The total number of screenshots grew anouth thousand plus and passed 9,000.
April 10, 2005 Two new consoles where added to the database. The Philips Tele-spiel ES-2201 and the Interton Video 2000.
April 12, 2005 Another new console was added to the database. It was the Mattel Children's Discovery System.
April 22, 2005 The 5,000 unique scans mark was passed, and completely eclipsed three days later by the addition of 500 more scans.
April 26, 2005 The NEC PC-FX as well as all of its released games were added to the database.
May 22, 2005 The Sega 32X achieved a complete set of scans. This means the front and back of the box, the manual, and the cartridge could be viewed for every Sega 32X game in the database.
May 31, 2005 The database passed 7,000 scans.
June 4, 2005 Scans of the Nintendo World Championship 1990 cart for NES were uploaded. The scans of, and a ton of information for, this extremely rare NES game were supplied by Ben Smith. The same cartridge sold, shortly before we received the scans, for $1,975 on eBay.
September 23, 2005 The Commodore Amiga was added to the database.
September 29, 2005 The GamePark GP32 was added to the database.
October 11, 2005 10,000 scans were reached and surpassed.
November 8, 2005 Four new consoles were added to the database they were: EPOCH Cassette Vision, Bandai TV Jack Super Vision 8000, Entex Select-A-Game Machine and the Exidy Sorcerer.
November 10, 2005 Ohio Arts Etch-A-Sketch Animator 2000 and the EACA EG2000 Colour Genie were both added to the database.
November 15, 2005 The Magnavox Odyssey² had the last game in its library, Atlantis, scanned. Every game for this system has a complete set of scans in the RF Gen database.
November 23, 2005 The total number of games in the database passed 20,000. The Xbox 360 was also added to the database.
March 6, 2006 The Amstrad CPC 464 was added to the database.
March 9, 2006 In the late hours of the night the MSX was added to the database.
March 10, 2006 In the early hours of the morning the Epoch Game Pocket Computer was added to the database as well as of its released titles.
March 20, 2006 The 21,000th video game was added to the database.
April 12, 2006 The database passed 12,000 screenshots.
